Making a Difference « Wondering Fair

Moments of Generosity and Gratitude

2 11 2011

The other day, a friend of mine began to tell me about an experience that had happened to him recently.

“I was walking to catch my bus from uni, along North Terrace, and I saw a homeless guy just standing on the corner. He was pretty old, and had a long white beard. But just before I’d passed him, I’d watched him make the sign of the cross – I don’t think he was making it to anybody in particular.”

“You don’t see that every day.” I said.

“No. So anyway, then I walked on. But as I was walking, I started to get this feeling. I got the sense that God, well, the Holy Spirit in me, wanted me to go back to the guy.”

This was pretty intriguing! I asked him what exactly he thought the Holy Spirit had wanted him to do.

“Well, it was kinda specific. The day was Monday, and my wife had given me some food – dry biscuits and some fruit-in-jars – for me to have for lunch throughout that week. I hadn’t got to my office yet, so they were still in my bag. I got the sense that God wanted me to go back to the guy and give him my food.”

“Wow. Okay. So did you go?” I asked.

“Well, there was more than that, actually…”

“Really?”

“Yup. I also got the sense that God wanted me to get a blessing from him.”

Now, that was surprising. Receiving blessings is not something people from our part of the Christian tradition would usually do.

“So, did you go?” I asked again.

“Not at first,” he said. “But then my wife rang, and she told me how she’d just picked up a bargain in Glenelg (a swanky seaside suburb here in Adelaide), and now she and my daughter were sitting on the beach, eating ice-cream.”

Now, I know my friend’s wife and kid – they’re hardly at Glenelg every day spending frivolously. I told him that he shouldn’t feel guilty.

“I know. I don’t think it was guilt. More gratitude. There was also a sense that if I did it, I’d be encountering something, um, special, sacred. So I turned around, and started walking to this guy. Every step I took, I was saying to myself, ‘You idiot, this is pointless!’ I was half-hoping that the guy had moved on. But he hadn’t.”

“So what happened when you met him?” I asked eagerly.

“Well,” my friend looked at me shyly, “I pulled out some of the biscuits and a jar of fruit…”

“Wait! Some of the biscuits, and one jar of fruit?” I asked.

“Er, yeah. I dunno, I just panicked. But when I handed them to him, you know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said to me, ‘Too Much!’. I, I was just astonished by that. I felt like it wasn’t enough. And I kinda felt like, his response was too much, for me. He was generous with his gratitude at my generosity. I didn’t deserve that. I suddenly felt grateful.”

“Wow. I can see that.” I said.

“And when I looked into his eyes as he said it, he was so happy. It made me see how God is so happy with the things we do for Him, even though they are so utterly inadequate. And how the happiness He feels at what we do is so gracious. The things we do are so minuscule, really. Yet He seems to say ‘Too much!’. I kinda saw Him saying that to me in the old man’s voice. It was pretty humbling.”

“Wow. So did you get a blessing?”

“That was funny.” My friend smiled. “I asked him for a blessing, and then he looked at me, and he said, ‘English, or Latin?’ I wasn’t expecting that! I’d thought he was some uneducated, crazy homeless guy. I stammered and told him that he could choose.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said, ‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.’ Then I bowed my head, smiled, we patted each other on the shoulder, and I began to leave. Then he said, ‘The Lord be with you.’ I turned, a bit surprised, and said, ‘Er, and also with you.’ Then that was that.”

My friend then told me how he felt a burning in his chest for the rest of the day, and ruminated on that moment for many days since. And I was left thinking how generous, and sacred, some moments in life can be.

Matt Gray

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Tags: faith, generosity, giving, grace, gratitude, Holy Spirit, religion
Categories : Making a Difference

Why Jesus Won’t Heal ‘Disabilities’

19 10 2011

“Dude, you severed my finger.” Sadly it was true. Anthony and I were moving heavy logs, in preparation for a youth camp—kumbuyah round the camp-fire. “1-2-and … STOP!”—and like that his arm locked, I dropped, and the finger lopped. Doh. First came the shock. Then came the accusations: “What about my music career?” Anthony was a talented saxophonist, headed for the music conservatorium. I’m not into brass, but I gather missing a digit makes it difficult to dance over the spatula keys reciting John Coltrane’s ‘Round Midnight’. Anthony was now ‘disabled’.

Jesus’ promises came to mind: “Believe and you’ll receive; ask and it will be given; nothing is impossible.”[1] So like faithful disciples, we drew close, joined hands, and squeezed our eyes shut like Dorothy hoping for Kansas. We prayed, and … well, suffice to say, minutes later we were groping around the dirt for the missing member, carting Anthony and his detached bit off to hospital.

Marshall Brain, the author of whywontgodhealamputees.com, wouldn’t be surprised. His argument is simple. God’s powerful, right? And we know God through Jesus, the guy who supposedly cared for the hurting and went around healing the sick. Jesus then promises us these same powers, in response to prayer. And yet … form a prayer chain of millions and the disability remains. This loving God never regenerates lost limbs—the one non-ambiguous, empirical case of healing which couldn’t be psycho-somatic or coincidental. Two binary conclusions are offered: 1) God has a grudge against amputees; or 2) God is imaginary and therefore doesn’t heal anyone: amputees are no different.

For all his brains, I’m confused how Michael moved from “Jesus healed everyone except amputees” to “Jesus never healed anyone—past or present—as God doesn’t exist.” And a skim of the Scriptures highlights that Jesus did heal amputees, i.e., lepers and the ‘maimed’. Scour the web and you’ll find countless responses to his second contention.[2] But what of the first contention? What of Anthony?

Healing amputees is a subset of any regeneration, so let’s broaden the accusation to God’s grudge against anyone with a physical disability. As Brain notes, “if someone is born with a congenital defect … no amount of prayer is going to fix the problem.” Yet ‘disability’ is a knotty and complex issue. Do all ‘disabilities’ need to be healed? Perhaps Jesus had good reasons for not healing Anthony?

Humour me. Take a few minutes and read John 9. Granted, Jesus heals this guy. But perhaps you’ll see here a subtext for why Jesus won’t heal disabilities.

You may know this story well. It’s the one about the man blind from birth—let’s call him Ben—who Jesus unconventionally heals by rubbing spit and clay into his eyes! And then there’s a saga before the empirical doubters—in this case religious rulers—who refuse to believe Ben was really healed. They interrogate this man, his parents, and then the man again before excommunicating him from their club. It’s worth a fresh look if our spiritual eyes are to regenerate and see the deepest disability of all.

A few quick observations: First, Jesus ‘saw’ the man who was blind, not for his disability, but for his personhood (v1). Ben wasn’t a data point in a sceptic’s set, nor was he a theological conundrum for religious apologists. Jesus truly saw Ben, and loved Him. The imago Dei isn’t an ability or function, but an identity as a child of God, created and loved by the Father, thus worthy of respect. Contra-Descartes, “I love (and am loved) therefore I am.”

Second, Ben’s blindness definitely was a disability, as he lacked the love of community to offer friendship and meaningful activity that might otherwise make his life ‘normal’. As theologian Amos Yong points out, “disability is … the experience of discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion from the social, cultural, political, and economic domains of human life.”[3] Not surprisingly, then, Jesus embraces Ben after he is excluded from the Temple, and draws him into community (vv34-38).

Third, Jesus redefines ‘disability’ at a deeper level. In verses 39-41, he exposes the pride of the empiricists: “I came to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind.” What is ‘blindness’ or ‘disability’? Perhaps what we call ‘ability’ is actually our pride magnifying “some able-bodied ideal of perfection”?[4] Perhaps what we call ‘disability’ is actually the glory of God in veiled form.[5] Do we have eyes to see that every ‘disability’—whether congenital blindness or an amputated limb—is less a challenge to our faith and God’s existence, and more an opportunity allowed by God in this fallen world for us to become family, where each member loves and is loved?

Isn’t this God’s way? Jesus Christ is the ‘disabled God’. It was through the deformities of his body, paralysed on the cross, that he brought peace and salvation for the whole world. And even in his ‘resurrection body’, sceptical Thomas can still probe Jesus’ scars. In the mystery of God, the non-disabled are dependent on the disabled, whom God has chosen to be a means of saving grace. In this light I see why, many times, Jesus won’t heal disabilities. God made us to be one. And many times ‘disability’ dissolves when we recognise “their central roles both in the communion of saints and in the divine scheme of things.”[6]

So, while Jesus regenerated Ben’s eyes, my mate’s finger went begging. Granted, I wanted him to recreate Anthony’s pointer like Malchus’s severed ear.[7] But Jesus has good reasons why he won’t heal disability, and it’s not because God doesn’t exist. Ultimately, God will set everything right, and this new creation rushes forward to greet us when least expected. But right now, in the miracle of loving community, together we’ve discovered that “God’s grace is all we need; His power works best in weakness.”[8] And for all of us, including Anthony, that is the most soul-full song there is.

Dave Benson

[1] Matthew 7:7; 17:20; 18:19; 21:21; Mark 11:24; John 14:14.

[2] See here for further responses. Concerning ‘miracles’ see here.

[3] Theology and Down Syndrome (Baylor, 2007), 162.

[4] Ibid., 282.

[5] 2 Corinthians 4:3-12.

[6] Yong, 188, 282.

[7] Luke 22:50-51.

[8] 2 Corinthians 12:5-10.

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Tags: amputation, amputee, blind, community, disability, faith, God, healing, image of God, imago Dei, Jesus, miracle, prayer, weakness
Categories : Making a Difference, On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

Will there be Macs in heaven?

7 10 2011

Steve Jobs’ death on Wednesday “provoked the largest online response of any event in recent history” according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Even the briefest survey of news outlets, Twitter, and Google seems to support this claim. I became a Mac user in the late 90s through a friend and bought my first teal-blue iBook in 2000. When my husband and I married in 2003, I brought him into the fold and we became an Apple household. Since then, we have converted family and friends and, at this point in time, everything we do in the world that isn’t through flesh and blood interaction seems to be done through an Apple product. The internet is full of eulogies to Jobs and paeans to Apple at the moment, so I won’t rehearse the beauty of their design, their pioneering of user-friendly lifestyle programs, or their revolutionizing of how we experience music, travel, talking on the phone….

A theology professor I know once commented―in all seriousness―that there would be Macs in heaven. While this may sound like a strange comment for a theology professor to make, it gets at something inherent in the Apple ethos and Steve Jobs’ creative genius that is deeply instructive about what it means to be human.

Apple’s creations are revered for being not only good products but beautiful products: they speak to us aesthetically even as they enable luddites like me fully engage the digital world. The sleek silver curves of an iMac or MacBook, the brilliant images that iPads put into our hands, the excitement generated by Jobs “one more thing…” are testaments to good work done well, to human creativity bringing about products that are more than instrumental and utilitarian tools, even as they fill instrumental roles. It is for this reason that this theology professor commented on the eternal standing of Apple products. As Miroslav Volf writes about those who make such products, “their noble efforts are not lost…everything good, true, and beautiful they create is valued by God and will be appreciated by human beings in the new creation.” [1]

Whether or not Macs will be in the New Creation, this sense of good, true and beautiful work is largely, I believe, what has driven the mass of international reflection on Steve Jobs in the wake of his death. Being virtually synonymous with Apple Computers, Steve Jobs’ life is an example of a life dedicated to good work―work that serves its purpose well, work that makes people’s lives easier, work that connects people, and that does all of this with beautiful style. He told the class of 2005 at Stanford University, “You’ve got to find what you love…Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” When we reflect back at Steve Jobs’ life, his demanding perfectionism and obsession with detail are excused because of this dedication to good work. What is more, we see in him a man whose dedication to doing good work speaks to us about what it means to be human.

While Jobs was not a Christian, his commitment to doing good work well resonates strongly with the biblical tradition. According to that tradition, humanity was created to work creatively in the world, epitomized in Adam’s charge to tend the garden of Eden and his work of naming, of creatively identifying and fostering identities and communities within creation (Genesis 2:15, 20). Later in the story, God honors the artists of Israel with a special wisdom for creating the tabernacle that was to be his dwelling place (Exodus 35:31). According to church tradition, the tables that Jesus made were of exceptional quality and craftsmanship. But the really intriguing bit is the end of the story. In St. John’s vision of the New Creation, he writes that “the glory and honor of the nations” will be brought into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:26). What is the glory and honor of the nations? Many biblical scholars think that it is our good work―the things we create here and now that are good, true and beautiful. In other words, God builds his new creation not ex nihilo like the original creation but, at least in part, out of the materials that we bring through our work in life: Shakespeare’s plays, sanitation systems…maybe even iThings.

Jessica Hughes

[1] Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit, 92.

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Tags: Apple, computers, creation, creativity, grace, innovation, Steve Jobs, technology, work
Categories : Making a Difference

Rules of Life

23 09 2011

Usain Bolt was recently disqualified from the Men’s 100m final at the World Athletics Championships in South Korea. His crime? One false start. Previously, athletes had been allowed a single false start, with disqualification following a second, but a recent change in the rules denied the world’s fastest man a second attempt.

Was that right? Was it fair? I’m sure athletics committees round the world are puzzling over these questions. But it’s useful for us to puzzle this over too: what is the point of having rules and what is the point of playing by them?

I’ve often heard it said of the Bible, “It’s just a book of rules,” and indeed the Bible does contain rules. A cursory glance at the Pentateuch—the first five books in the Bible—reveals all kinds of rules and regulations ranging from the obvious (e.g. “You shall not murder,” Deut. 5:17) to the obscure (e.g. “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk,” Deut. 14:21b). What are they there for?

Many of these rules are spiritual disciplines and ethical instructions which, if observed, would mark Israel out as God’s people among neighbouring nations, some of whom engaged in profoundly malevolent religious practices. But there’s another purpose to biblical rules and regulations, expounded more fully in the New Testament: the rules promote life.

Even athletics rules exist not to constrain the athletes or make life tough for them, but to help them race well and to the best of their ability.

That said, rules can be used and abused in a different way. At secondary school I learned to play the clarinet and classical guitar. Year in, year out, I practised scales, arpeggios, learned pieces for music exams, and performed in school concerts. Yet in fourteen years (gulp) since leaving high school, I’ve barely touched either instrument. The reason? Simple: year in, year out, I practised scales, arpeggios, and learned music for exams but never learned to love the music for the music itself. It was all about ‘getting it right,’ playing by the rules and playing perfectly. Surely music is about more than that?

Lots of people in Jesus’ day got into confusion about rules. They either broke them in rebellion against a God they perceived to be a harsh taskmaster, or gave up trying to keep them, perceiving that they were too far gone for God to care, or they lived by the rules to the letter but without love in their hearts. Jesus encounters people from each of these camps, breaks a number of ‘rules,’ and teaches us all a valuable lesson: that God’s rules are made for the flourishing of people, not people for the upkeep of God’s rules (cf. Mark 2:27).

Some years after I left secondary school, I picked up my guitar and started to play a piece that I’d struggled to play at school. I had found it technically difficult and my palms used to sweat when playing under pressure (which felt like most of the time), making it all but impossible. Yet with no ‘taskmaster’ present to rebuke me, no examiner to tell me my playing was substandard, and with no other motive to play than to enjoy the music, my fingers got round the notes with ease. I found I could play by the rules but not for the rules and it felt marvellous.

Madi Simpson

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Tags: athletics, clarinet, God, Israel, Jesus, life, morality, Music, Olympics, rules, running, usain bolt
Categories : Making a Difference

Why it is not wrong to kill chickens

19 09 2011

Is it ever right to kill a chicken? Or a dog, or a human being? If not, who says so? God, or our conscience, or plain reason, or utilitarian consequences? The nature and origin of morality has been one of the most disputed areas in Western philosophy ever since Socrates, and the question is not only philosophical: it addresses us also every day, whenever we encounter actions which repulse our conscience, like abuse or poverty or hypocrisy. Inside or outside academic circles, I fell that this is one of the central questions of life: where do we get our deep sense of right and wrong?

In a surprisingly candid essay this month in The New York Times, called Confessions of an Ex-Moralist, Yale scholar Joel Marks reveals his unexpected and tortuous path across moral philosophy. He professes himself an atheist, who used to believe in right and wrong as independent absolute principles, within a secular framework. But here comes the punch: Marks confesses how, over time, he came to acknowledge that independent principles can’t be absolute; there can’t be solid right or wrong without a transcendental authority to define them. For the secularist, the only option is to, ironically, make morality absolute and divine. “The day I became an atheist was the day I realized I had been a believer,” as Marks puts it.

I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted. [1]

How can we resolve this dilemma? Morality is absolute, we all feel anger whenever we hear about massacres, for example, even if they are half-way across the globe. Marks himself confesses, “And yet I knew in my soul, with all of my conviction, with a passion, that [things like discrimination of homosexuals and mass murder of chickens for human consumption] were wrong, wrong, wrong. I knew this with more certainty than I knew that the earth is round.” How can a secularist then – who dismisses a transcendental God who defines what right and wrong is, and who imparts this conscience to us – explain the human instinct for morality?

It is here that Marks’ journey is even more telling: despite his deep sense of right and wrong, in order to be consistent to his secular framework, he simply throws morality out of the window. Right and wrong do not exist objectively, as categorically as he knows certain things are wrong, wrong, wrong. He writes, “But suddenly I knew it no more. I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong. But neither are they right; nor are they permissible. The entire set of moral attributions is out the window.”

In the end, for Marks remains just sheer desire: Mother Teresa followed her desire to care for dying people in the same way Marquis de Sade followed his craving to inflict sexual pain; each is just following what their desires command them. Marks is left just with his desires, trying to educate them to be morally commendable desires, but without any framework to define what is moral and believing everything is amoral. “I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument.”

I really appreciate Marks’ honesty. His journey illustrates the contortions and intellectual acrobatics humans perform when they deny the basic fact that defines what does it mean to be human: we are good creations of a good God. We fall into secularism or relativism, into inconsistency or contradiction, trying to fend off a divine basis for our morality. But hey, we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and there is no escaping it. I’d rather acknowledge our knowledge of what good and wrong is, and our need for God, and try to live according to his blazing goodness, than deny the conscience that makes us human, and see myself grow a bit closer to Marquis de Sade than to Mother Teresa.

René Breuel

[1] Joel Marks, “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist”, The New York Times, Aug 21st, 2001. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/confessions-of-an-ex-moralist/?hp

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Tags: desire, ethics, evil, God, goodness, Marquis de Sade, morality, Mother Teresa, suffering, Yale
Categories : Making a Difference

Is There Life After Success?

24 08 2011

To answer this question, we need to understand what success in life is:
When you are 12-months-old, success is to be able to walk.
When you are 2, success is not pee in the pants.
When you are 15, success is to have sex.
When you are 18, success is to have a driver’s licence.
When you are 30, success is to have money.
When you are 60, success is to have a lot more money.
When you are 70, success is to have a driver’s licence.
When you are 80, success is to have sex.
When you are 85, success is to have a lot of friends.
When you are 90, success is to not pee in the pants.
When you are 95, success is to be able to walk.

Moral: success varies according to what it signifies in each stage of life and in the culture we belong to. For a competing athlete, success is to be a champion. For the gunman, success is the number of unhappy souls that have crossed his path. Success is the realization of a dream, but once the target is met, success loses its reason for being and we feel aimless.

I, for one, fell in love with cars as a little boy, and aspired to become a race driver for my whole life. I worked hard, trained exhaustively, tried to summon all the resources I could reach to fund my racing, until I arrived at the top racing category: the Formula 1. Those were thrilling, challenging, intense years, but when they finished, I could not help but ask: now what?

Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy. For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line. His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead. In this case, there will not be life after success.

In order to survive success, we need instead to find the meaning of our life, to discover our true vocation and the purpose that justifies our existence. As Frederick Buechner puts it, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”[1] In this perspective, Mother Teresa was much wealthier than Bill Gates, at least until the day in which he stopped running Microsoft to dedicate himself to philanthropy and humanitarian help, in the search for a purpose for his life. To help others is surely a more noble kind of enterprise, yet the problem is that noble and praiseworthy success is still perishable success. Any life project that does not transcend the here and now is faded to end in a cemetery.

I believe lasting success is success that transcends the grave. Death gathers all limitations that result from our disconnection from the source of life. And in my analysis, throughout cockpits and soccer stadiums and victory celebrations and losses at the last inch and days of plain routine, I have not found someone who can reconcile and reconnect us to the source and maintainer of life as Jesus Christ does. Only through him will there be life after all and every success.

Alex Dias Ribeiro is a former Formula 1 driver, and has accompanied the Brazilian teams as a chaplain in many of the last World Cups and Summer Olympics.

[1] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (New York: HarperOne, 1993).

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Tags: death, failure, Ferrari, Formula 1, Frederick Buechner, happiness, Jesus Christ, life, sport, success
Categories : Making a Difference

Gluttony, Justice, and Grace

12 08 2011

Donna Simpson has been making headlines over the past few weeks for her goal of becoming the world’s fattest woman. News clips of the morbidly obese woman discussing her goal run like parodies of similar human interest stories: her partner “supporting” Donna in her run for the record-books and Donna discussing her lack of fear in the face of such a dangerous endeavor, because she believes “our time is set.” Curiously, Donna’s comments suggest a vaguely religious outlook in which God has planned each individual’s death and the individual’s own actions can do little to alter this inevitable end, an outlook that allows her to face her world-record attempt without fear.

Despite gluttony being one of the “seven deadly sins” of tradition, studies on obesity in America by Purdue University sociologist Ken Ferraro note an uncanny link between Christian faith and obesity, with obesity increasing as people move closer toward Christian fundamentalism. Perhaps because so many Christians are so large, one is hard pressed to find many pastors preaching against the evils of gluttony and resulting obesity. What is more, not only is it socially unacceptable to criticize people for being overweight, such criticisms often fail to take account of the medical and psychological reasons why a person is fat. I would like to think that the lack of Christian outcry about obesity and its causes grows out of a deep love of people and a desire to take account of these root causes. However, given the willingness of many Christians to rail on anyone for being gay or for having an abortion, it seems far more likely that the church’s silence on gluttony is because this sin hits too close to home.

So, why then am I willing to rush headlong into discussing obesity and linking it to the traditional sin of gluttony? After all such a move risks at least insensitivity, if not outright offense. But I believe we must discuss gluttony as such because, in doing so, we begin to depoliticize the issue of obesity and return food to its proper place within creation. Through this, we realize that the biblical concept of gluttony is not a prohibition against yet another pleasure of the flesh but an issue of justice and peace that has implications that reach even farther than western countries’ ever-expanding waistlines.

Reflecting on gluttony within a biblical worldview reveals that gluttony is not about having a svelte form but about consuming more than one needs, which always proves to be detrimental to others and the self. Put this way, gluttony is not just about over-eating but about the myriad forms of overconsumption that grip the west, implicating everyone, even the thin. Gluttony―be it energy gluttony, clothes gluttony, technology gluttony, food gluttony, debt gluttony―is ultimately a justice issue. Whether it is the farm-worker who supplies cheap food, the sweatshop teenager who makes cheap clothes, or the Mexican peasant who can’t afford corn because the prices are inflated due to the biofuel market, in a finite world of finite resources, when one person consumes more than he needs, it is quite likely that someone else doesn’t get enough, or that someone else is abused in the process of fulfilling the rapacious appetites of another. Frequently, the image of the glutton is combined with the drunkard, suggesting the person whose consumption denigrates themselves while risking violence to others.

As bleak and condemnatory as this biblical image of the glutton sounds, I believe it is be liberating because the biblical solution to gluttony isn’t to be found in strict-diets, calorie-counting and exercise regimes, or even in turning off the lights, buying energy-efficient light bulbs and thrift store clothes. Such solutions will, at best, eliminate some of the forms or appearance of gluttony but not restore a right-relationship between the individual and the created world. As American farmer Wendell Berry puts it, “…we cannot live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”^{^[1]} Thus, the biblical response to gluttony involves learning to see the finite, created world as a gift to be consumed lovingly―it is a vision of consumption with restraint growing out of respect for the people and processes that go into producing a fresh loaf of bread, a bunch of grapes, or a glass of wine.

Jessica Hughes

^{^[1]} From Wendell Berry’s “The Gift of Good Land” (1979), in The Art of the Commonplace, ed by Norman Wirzba, 2002, 304)

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Tags: creation, eating, environment, gluttony, grace, justice, Wendell Berry
Categories : Making a Difference

The Catharsis of Kindness

29 07 2011

‘Practice random acts of kindness.’ I came across this bumper sticker a number of times while working in the U.S.. The word ‘random’ means ‘accidental’ or ‘chance’, and doesn’t carry any sense of purpose or intent, but I think what the bumper sticker is trying to say is ‘be spontaneous.’

Be spontaneous with kindness. Why? What can kindness accomplish? It feels good to be on the receiving end of a kind act, but what more than that? I’ve received more than my fair share of kindness in recent weeks and I’m starting to pursue the ‘what more.’ My 17 week old daughter suffers from severe Gastro-oesophogeal reflux and has to be fed through a naso-gastric tube when she won’t take a bottle, which is most of the time. Babies need to feed many times a day, but it is incredibly stressful trying to feed a baby who, though hungry, doesn’t want to feed, refuses to feed, and/or is in pain and discomfort when she feeds. It’s irregular (shouldn’t babies be comforted by food?) and very distressing. However, people are typically very sympathetic to a baby girl with a sweet face and a tube coming out of her nose. But what of the child’s mother? What do people make of the woman crying in a waiting room? Or losing her patience and temper as, for the fourth or fifth time that day, her baby screams, won’t drink, and is promptly sick as just a tiny amount of milk trickles into her stomach through the tube?

All I can say is, to those of you who do practice spontaneous or even random acts of kindness, your acts can have a disproportionately positive impact. A nurse passing by as I sat in a waiting room, noticing my distress, took my child in her arms and held the syringe for me as I slowly poured milk into it. She then offered me tea and sat with me while I gathered myself together. Someone at a playgroup offered to look after my toddler. Someone gave up their seat on the bus. Someone sent food to my house. Someone paid for a taxi to the hospital.

I often think of the Samaritan woman Jesus came across at Jacob’s well (John 4). Jesus asks if she will give him something to drink (will a socially withdrawn and emotionally damaged woman treat him, a Jewish male, kindly?) before offering her a gift she does not deserve and could not possibly repay. Yes, it was amazing that he knew everything she’d ever done, but equally amazing and no doubt stirring for the woman was the kindness with which he treated her. No judgment, no condemnation, no prerequisites. A random encounter for her provides the opportunity for a deliberate encouragement from him, which changes the course of her life.

We don’t know if Jesus knew that this woman would be at the well that day but he didn’t hesitate to be kind to her when she showed up. Even knowing what he did—that she was a woman with five failed marriages, currently living with a man not her husband, or worse, not her husband—didn’t stop him from being kind to her. He could have given her a useful lesson in relationships but instead he offers her the gift of eternal life and love. When she heads back to town she’s a changed woman.

The cup of tea the nurse offered me that day was not eternal life, and I am living with my first not fifth husband, but by the time I got home that day, my spirits had revived, and when she phoned me the next day to see how I was, the world truly felt like a better place. Her kindness was kinetic and cathartic: it moved me and released me. What might your kindness release? Who might your kindness release? Random kindness is nice. But acts of spontaneous intentional take-time-for-you kindness are better by far.

Madi Simpson

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Tags: ethics, generosity, kindness, love
Categories : Making a Difference

Feeling Tired Too?

15 07 2011

Recently, I’ve begun thinking that I may be too tired to be a Christian. Trying to juggle my PhD program, my husband’s home-based business start-up, a ten-month old who doesn’t like taking naps or sleeping generally, a Great Dane puppy, renovation work on our house and garden, day-to-day tasks like cooking, cleaning, gardening, and delightful visits from family and friends means that I have very little energy at the start of the day (let alone the end of the day) to engage the life of biblical faith as it is generally practiced.

I feel, in other words, that the life of faith―even as it permeates every bit of who we are and what we do such that it isn’t really an additional activity but a sort of disposition or way of living―still has this sort of intellectual burden that goes with it, a sort of responsibility to think well about life and to ponder life’s “big questions.” A faith that fails to engage in this constant, high-level way risks becoming (or being caricatured) as mindless, unthinking, or naive. My problem is that after processing the daily stimuli of this busy world, the Christian faith often adds another level of processing–and then pondering–information and ideas through activities like prayer and reflection, reading and studying the bible, going to church, and thinking more fully and deeply about how to live well. Thus, I feel too tired to be a Christian.

As I muster up the energy to reflect on my predicament a bit more, I remember Jesus’s words to his disciples in Matthew: “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden light” (11-28-30). We must be attentive to the exact invitation that Jesus is offering in this passage because the invitation is far more specific we might at first think. The invitation is a call to the “weary” (or those who labor, in some translations) and an invitation to rest. First and foremost, whatever the Christian faith looks like, it is not an invitation to intellectual, moral, ethical, spiritual, physical laziness: it is an invitation issued for those who are already working, thinking, doing and exhausted from it! The invitation to rest also assumes the context of work and activity–one can hardly rest from doing nothing.

The monastic tradition has always emphasized prayer, work and rest and St. Benedict even said that nothing was to be preferred to the work of God, which for him meant the communal prayer of the liturgy (Rule 43.3). Playing off this tradition, many people speak of prayer as work and others have gone so far as to say that “to work is to pray,” in the sense of doing good work well, for the glory of God and for the sake of the world. It is true that the Christian life is about living in a vibrant way that fully engages the world God made and that he loves. That said, the Christian faith is not simply about reading more, thinking more, going to more, doing more―it is also about rest. Thus, I would like to suggest that “to rest” can also be “to pray” and that prayer must be rest as as well as work. One could say that the notion of faith is actually this idea of “rest.” It is the point at which we can set aside the big questions that trouble our minds and chores that demands our energy and rest, trusting God to take care of the world, to someday answer the hard questions, and to still love us after we wake up from a nice, long nap.

Jessica Hughes

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Tags: busy, faith, rest, tiredness, work
Categories : Making a Difference

Reading, Identification, and Vocation

20 06 2011

It was the intervention of Caesar Augustus which, one day long ago, saved one of the most celebrated narratives of ancient history. Virgil’s last wish was to burn his epic Aeneid, a work which for C. S. Lewis changed “ the subject from the adolescent theme of heroism to the adult theme of vocation.” [1] One can only wonder what resonated so deeply in Caesar Augustus to move him to save this narrative, and the ways in which the emperor identified his own vocation with Virgil’s narrative about the foundation of Rome.

The contrast between Augustus and one of his modern counterparts could not be more poignant. When the Allied forces arrived in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, they noticed a strange kind of library. It was filled with books about art, architecture, photography and histories of wars. But the report of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps noticed an eloquent gap in Hitler’s library: “it was noticeably lacking in literature and almost totally devoid of drama and poetry.” [2] The Führer was not as moved by great narratives as the emperor once was; Hitler’s spirit was forged in a different kind of arena, and one can only wonder how the lack of literary oxygen dwarfed Hitler’s soul, though maybe superior in military skill, in contrast to his ancient colleague. It seemed like Hitler tasted just the wrong measure of the literary spring which, for Alexander Pope, should either be drunk abundantly or not drunk at all:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
And drinking largely sobers us again.[3]

However much Augustus or Hitler may have read, we all know that to read is a curious experiment. It immerses us in alternative worlds; it enlarges our imagination and our ability to identify with others. When we see ourselves in an epic journey from Troy to Rome which, in 10,000 lines of Latin poetry, stretches our ability to conceive the world, feel it in a particular journey, and color it from an alternative perspective, we consider scenarios which would never cross our path in other ways. We experience the heroic, the virtuous, the tragic, and this trying-out enriches our posture before the ordinary and prosaic. As we play out as heroes, to use Lewis’ phrases, this imaginary weight-lifting enriches our understanding of our own vocations.

We may be statesmen or not, poets or poets-to-be, but an illuminating test for the fabric of our vocation is the kind of reading in which we develop it. It is hard for us to concentrate in long narratives today, as accustomed we are to headline reading and internet browsing. But a sustained engagement of literature like the Aeneid or Moses’ discourse in Deuteronomy or the chronicles of King David pays off, even if often we can’t trace the direct practicality they can bring to our work. But as we see Ulysses facing his journey across the sea, or Jesus his journey to the cross, something inside us grows, and we arrive at our unheroic challenges larger, more vocationally robust, somehow more heroic.

René Breuel